Hard Times

Behold, may that night be barren; may no joyful shout enter it.  Job 3:7 NASB

 Barren – The Hebrew word galmûd is derived from the verb gālam.  The verb only occurs in 2 Kings 2:8.  “And Elijah took his coat, folded it, and struck the waters, and they were divided here and there, so that the two of them crossed over on dry ground.”  You probably can’t guess which of these English verbs is gālam.  It’s “folded.”  Two other derivatives are used only once each, in Ezekiel 27:24 and in Psalm 139:16.  That tells us this is an unusual word, one we need to pay close attention to.  But when we look at lexicons, we find almost nothing about it.  The range of meanings includes “wrap up, fold, fold together, wrapping, garment, hard, barren” and “embryo” (only in Psalm 139:16).  If we look at the Paleo-Hebrew consonant structure, we might come away with some combination of גַּלְמוּד :

Lift up (gimmel)

Rod, authority, tongue, teaching (lamed)

Water, chaos, disorder, strength (mem)

Join, nail, secure (vav)

Door, path (dalet)

But it’s hard to see how any of these terms can result in “barren.”  Perhaps the word is chiastic, that is, a structure in which the words (the meaning of each consonant) is repeated in reverse order.  Maybe like this:

Lift up authority – chaos, disorder – secure a path.

In other words, to be barren contains the idea of life, and life implies order, but in the middle of this projection is chaos, disorder and that unravels the potential security of the path.  To be barren is to experience the failure of living, the end of the dream, the return to nothingness.  When Job wishes the night of his birth to be galmûd, he is really wishing that the apparent order of life, an order that he once thought was laid out before him, would never have occurred because it has turned out to be the end of everything he hoped for.  His wealth is gone.  His children are dead.  His wife has turned against him.  He leaves nothing behind to mark his existence.  Under these circumstances, all purposefulness disappears.  There is no reason to be.

One of the most powerful themes of the ancient world was legacy.  We see it in the genealogies of the Bible.  My life matters because I have taken up the responsibility of the past and provided another step toward the future.  I’ve left something behind for others to follow.  But what happens when all that I have including my offspring are taken away?  What happens when I have nothing to give to the world to come?  If my fate is to be the end of the story, would it not be better not to write the story at all?  And what about you and me?  What if our fate is also to come to the end of the road with nothing left?  What then is the purpose of being alive?

Topical Index: galmûd, barren, end, Job 3:7